Rajarata University of Sri Lanka Year-2 Semester-1

Rajarata University of Sri Lanka

Department of Languages

Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities

Online Lectures

Year and Semester	Year-2 Semester-1
Subject	Syntax and Semantics
Subject Code	ENGL 2112
Course Unit	Universal Grammar-2
Date	14.05.2020
Time	Theory (11.00 am-12.00 am)  Practical (12.30 pm-1.30 pm)
Lecturer	D.N. Aloysius
Theory Hours	01                                            Total  No of  Hours: 06
Practical Hours	01                                            Total  No of  Hours: 06

Universal Grammar

The term "universal grammar" predates Noam Chomsky, but pre-Chomskyan ideas of universal grammar are different. For Chomsky, UG is "the theory of the genetically based language faculty", which makes UG a theory of language acquisition, and part of the innateness hypothesis. Earlier grammarians and philosophers thought about universal grammar in the sense of a universally shared property or grammar of all languages. The closest analog to their understanding of universal grammar in the late 20th century are Greenberg's linguistic universals.

The idea of a universal grammar can be traced back to Roger Bacon's observations in his c. 1245 Overview of Grammar and c. 1268 Greek Grammar that all languages are built upon a common grammar, even though it may undergo incidental variations; and the 13^th  century speculative grammarians who, following Bacon, postulated universal rules underlying all grammars. The concept of a universal grammar or language was at the core of the 17^th century projects for philosophical languages. An influential work in that time was Grammaire générale by Claude Lancelot and Antoine Arnauld, who built on the works of René Descartes. They tried to describe a general grammar for languages, coming to the conclusion that grammar has to be universal. There is a Scottish school of universal grammarians from the 18^th  century, as distinguished from the philosophical language project, which included authors such as James Beattie, Hugh Blair, James Burnett, James Harris, and Adam Smith. The article on grammar in the first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1771) contains an extensive section titled "Of Universal Grammar".

This tradition was continued in the late 19^th century by Wilhelm Wundt and in the early 20^th century by linguist Otto Jespersen. Jespersen disagreed with early grammarians on their formulation of "universal grammar", arguing that they tried to derive too much from Latin, and that a UG based on Latin was bound to fail considering the breadth of worldwide linguistic variation. He does not fully dispense with the idea of a "universal grammar", but reduces it to universal syntactic categories or super-categories, such as number, tenses, etc.  Jespersen does not discuss whether these properties come from facts about general human cognition or from a language specific endowment (which would be closer to the Chomskyan formulation). As this work predates molecular genetics, he does not discuss the notion of a genetically conditioned universal grammar.

During the rise of behaviorism, the idea of a universal grammar (in either sense) was discarded. In the early 20th century, language was usually understood from a behaviourist perspective, suggesting that language acquisition, like any other kind of learning, could be explained by a succession of trials, errors, and rewards for success. In other words, children learned their mother tongue by simple imitation, through listening and repeating what adults said. For example, when a child says "milk" and the mother will smile and give her child milk as a result, the child will find this outcome rewarding, thus enhancing the child's language development. UG reemerged to prominence and influence in modern linguistics with the theories of Chomsky and Montague in the 1950s–1970s, as part of the "linguistics wars".

In 2016 Chomsky and Berwick co-wrote their book titled Why Only Us, where they defined both the minimalist program and the strong minimalist thesis and its implications to update their approach to UG theory. According to Berwick and Chomsky, the strong minimalist thesis states that "The optimal situation would be that UG reduces to the simplest computational principles which operate in accord with conditions of computational efficiency.

Practical: Discuss the Concept of Universal Grammar with reference to Noam Chomsky.

References:

1.      Chomsky's universal grammar  by Vivian Cook

2.      Universal Grammar and second language acquisition by Lydia White